Reacción a "Counties in the United States near operating nuclear power plants have higher cancer mortality rates"

Whilst they found that living near a nuclear power plan was associated with higher risks of cancer mortality this cannot necessarily be attributed to the radiation exposure.  Several of the findings do not fit with our understanding of radiation and cancer.  The pattern of risks with age are not what we would expect with radiation exposure, which is usually higher risks with younger age at exposure not the reverse.  Secondly, the size of the risk is much higher than we would expect based on the typical radiation exposure levels around nuclear power plants.  

An important limitation is that they did not look at the types of cancer - we know some cancers are more strongly related to radiation and if these cancers were increased that would have provided more evidence that the findings were due to radiation.  It is surprising that they did not look at this and although they mention this is a limitation they don't explain why they did not do this analysis even though the data should have been available in the CDC dataset.     

The findings should not be extrapolated to the UK as we don't know whether there could be other explanations for the increased cancer mortality risks around these nuclear power plants specific to the US.